Taxpayers, Meet Your New Tenants

The American Spectator reports on how rent control in NYC is a bigger issue than New York:

So why is this of interest to anyone outside New York? Well, through the magic of federal mortgage guarantees, the U.S. taxpayer will soon be shouldering the burden of subsidizing 25,000 regulated tenants in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, a city-within-a-city on the East Side of Manhattan that is New York's biggest housing complex. Tishman Speyer Properties, one of the world's largest real estate companies, inauspiciously bought the property in 2006, confident it could drive a wedge into New York rent regulations. Four years later, it has discovered what every Polish-speaking landlord-janitor living in his basement apartment has known for decades – in New York the rent-controlled tenant always wins.

As a result, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which have already burned through $111 billion of federal bailout money -- are on the hook for another $2 billion. Fortunately, unlike the Big Bad Banks Obama keeps warning us about, Fannie and Freddie both have open access to the U.S. Treasury. And so they will able to sustain 25,000 middle class tenants -- many of them owners of second homes far from New York -- in apartments where they are often paying less than half the market rent.

You'll want to read the whole article.